Introduction:
Performance coaching, as the name states, focuses on performance as the coachable variable. But is that all that matters? Is coaching merely a transactional relationship between an athlete and a coach? Does only the result or performance dictate the success or failure of the coach? Is data processing the primary skill of a coach or do intangibles like coaching intuition, people skills, etc. play a role? Is there a specific coaching system or philosophy that is optimal and how have various coaching styles evolved throughout the years to reach their current state? How can we as coaches adapt to the dynamic sports arena and technological advancements and evolve as modern coaches? Triathlon, specifically the long-distance triathlon (Half Ironman & the Full Ironman distance), and triathlon coaching are the focus of this journal article.
Triathlon is a very new sport and started only a few decades ago even though the individual sports of swim, bike, and run have had foundations and history lasting centuries. The Long-distance triathlon (LDT) as we know it now, traces back its roots to Hawaii, where in 1977 a test of fitness was arranged among military personnel as a means of knowing which athlete from the 3 disciplines of the swim, bike, and run was the fittest (Ironman, n.d.). This was the origin of the well-renowned IRONMAN triathlon. To me, triathlon is the pinnacle of endurance sport. The reason is that it involves 3 major endurance sports and needs proficiency in the water as well as land. Triathletes in the upper echelon of the sport are masters of the 3 trades and jack of none. The pro triathletes of the modern era have fitness on the bike that can rival a World Tour cyclist in the Time Trial and probably defeat many. For example, Sam Laidlow averaged 339 watts for about 4 hours and 30 minutes in the Ironman World Championships in Nice last year at 4.5 watts/kg to become the youngest male World Champion in history (Hemming, 2023). This ride was right after a blistering 3.8 km swim and before a spectacular
42.2 km run!
The sport has evolved from a random test of fitness to a multi-billion-dollar industry with the IRONMAN still holding the revered top spot. The introduction of the Professional Triathletes Organization (PTO) which offers pro triathletes a ranking-based contract and end-of-year pay system has boosted the sport to new heights. The density of races available to athletes all around the world in all parts of the world is truly astounding with over 150+ qualifying races in over 50+ countries (IRONMAN, n.d.). Endurance sports and triathlon in India is a growing industry with the addition of the IRONMAN 70.3 Goa in 2019 playing a massive role in it.
Triathlon among the amateurs is a lifestyle sport. In no other sport do the amateurs get to race amongst the professionals on the same day in the same venue and rub shoulders against the fittest endurance athletes on the planet.
Since triathlon is a very physiologically dominant sport rather than a skill-dominant sport, being in control of your environment and living a healthy lifestyle is crucial for triathIon performance as well as health. Training should be periodized considering internal and external stressors and planned carefully. A bird's eye view to plan training, volume and intensity regulation, physiological testing, and guidance is crucial in triathIon. Without proper overwatch, the benefits of endurance training can be offset by the adverse effects of overtraining that can lead to serious mental and physical health conditions. It has been shown that a u and S-shaped relationship exists between exercise load and health in age groupers and professionals alike (Vleck, Millet and Bessone, 2014). This is why a coach is of paramount importance in triathlon.
The coaching for LDT is mostly dominated by the growing demand of the age group athletes and professionals alike.
The evolution of coaching philosophies and methods will be illustrated with examples of an old - school coach who has his roots in the 1990s and his training philosophies to the approach of a technology and data-driven modern coach dominating the sport in the 2020s.
The coaches we will be looking at in-depth are Brett Sutton and Olav Aleksandr Bu. Looking at their training philosophy, methods, and beliefs will help vividly show the evolution of performance coaching in LDT.
Brett Sutton is an Australian Triathlon and swim coach who has coached many top pros including World and Olympic champions like Chrissie Wellington, Nicola Spirig, and Emma Snowsill. He started his coaching career as a swim coach in his teens and transitioned to triathlon later. Although he does not have any considerable athletic experience in triathlon or swimming, his expertise has always been in observation and imparting knowledge. He even ventured into horse training. He is widely regarded by many as one of if not the best Triathlon coaches of the '90s and 2000s.
He has an authoritarian approach to coaching which adapts to individual athlete requirements. Feel and instinct gained through experience of coaching are his main strengths. His coaching philosophy adopts the old-school approach of training with very little focus on scientific innovation and data and rather takes a more observational and personal approach to training. He considers observation to be more important than communication. A few of his athletes have commented that he is quite hard on athletes while also imparting in their belief and mental strength. He considers psychology more important than physiology. He places a lot of importance on health and a holistic approach to training especially for age group athletes who do triathlon as a hobby. He believes in the motto “Don't try to fix anything that words” and does not believe in overthinking about training philosophy (Bertrand, 2015).
He places a lot of importance on understanding the needs of each athlete, their psyche, their backgrounds, and their weaknesses to tailor programs tackling these issues. The ‘art' of coaching is his strength and is not bounded by the scientific method, research, or dogma. He values successful approaches of the past to learn from and doesn't concentrate on the future development of scientific innovation. His view on technology in racing is pragmatic and only recommends using technology that works in his opinion and is not forced to use new technology just because it is fancy. He believes that disc wheels are useless to female triathletes as he believes they do not go above 40kph in an Ironman Race. He also believes that aero helmets do not allow heat to dissipate from the heads and cause a larger deficit in the run compared to a smaller aerodynamic gain on the bike (Wikipedia, n.d.).
His old-school approach, with technology and scientific innovation taking a back seat has yielded top results for mostly female triathletes in the past without question.
Olav Aleksandr Bu is the coach of the Norwegian triathletes who are at the top of the game now in short course and LDT namely, Kristian Blummenfelt and Gustav Iden. He has led Kristian to an Olympic Gold medal in Tokyo 2020, an IRONMAN World Championship, and Gustav Iden to multiple IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships. This is discounting multiple other wins at the highest level. Olav himself has no athletic background of any sort and his focus is on maximum human performance. He is data-driven and is a big believer in the scientific method and technological innovation.
He is the major driver of the famous Norwegian method that places a lot of emphasis and metabolic testing and regulating and prescribing workouts according to these values. Lactate testing and its use in monitoring training intensity is a key facet of this method. They place a very high value on high Training Volume (White, n.d.).
Olav looks at training as a cost and calories as the mode of payment. The Calories as a mode of measuring energy expenditure is a different way of looking at accumulated volume rather than just hours per week.
He uses physiological metrics like Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Resting Heart rates to measure recovery parameters (Eriksson, 2020).
He uses advanced testing and monitoring technologies like Muscle Oxygenation (MOXY) to set metabolic zones for training and measure core temperatures (Sindre, 2022).
Olav places a high importance on Altitude training and his athletes spend a considerable time in the high-altitude regions of Sierra Nevada (White, n.d.).
He coaches just a handful of athletes and believes in concentrating all his efforts on them. He places high importance on the coach-athlete connection and is not too keen to add any more athletes to his roster. He considers his athletes as friends first and camaraderie as the main glue that defines a working relationship and his athletes practice mindfulness to focus on the present (Gjerdingen, 2013).
The Norwegians are changing the game in the Short Course Triathlon and LDT and leading the paradigm shift. Olav's pioneering coaching style, which revolved around technology and data is leading the way in modern triathlon coaching. He is attempting now to coach Kristian Blummenfelt to a second Olympic Gold in Paris and win the IRONMAN World Championships in Kona in the same year. This feat has never been achieved before and will be an astounding feat even to be competitive in two contrasting distances.
As a coach to amateur triathletes and an age-group triathlete myself I believe in the “practice what you preach” approach. At ARISE Performance India, our objective as an organization is to make the sport more accessible to people in India, cultivate young talent from the country develop them to compete on the world stage, and instill a healthy culture of activity and training among our athletes. I believe consistency is of paramount importance for an athlete regardless of his/her training age and use Seiler's hierarchy of Endurance Training Needs as a guide for coaching athletes (Seiler, 2016).
Figure 1. Selier's Hierarchy of Endurance Training Needs
Technology has its place in training and embracing it is the way to go and adapting to changing landscapes is key. But I also believe that technology and upgrades should be used only if its pros outweigh the cons of cost and other complications. The level of testing and equipment used on the athlete should be justified. Using lactate testing or software like INSCYD might not be necessary for a novice/amateur athlete when the focus should be building consistency and activity. The athlete first should do his basics right and the focus of training should be to live a healthy lifestyle and enjoy training. Identifying and addressing an athlete’s limiters is crucial for designing a comprehensive and customized training program.
I currently use TrainingPeaks (TP) to analyze data and plan training schedules for my athletes. Indoor cycling software like Zwift and Garmin is synced to TP seamlessly. The Training Stress Score (TSS) is one of the primary metrics to gauge the athIete's performance and external training load (Halson, 2014).
Sleep data, Heart Rate (HR) trends, Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE), and session feedback are valuable metrics for me to assess an athlete's recovery and internal training load. I believe a focus on both, constitutes a holistic approach to coaching (Halson, 2014).
The technology used commonly among my athletes and myself include the SMART indoor trainers, wearable wristwatches, HR monitors, road bikes and Triathlon bikes, carbon plate running shoes, and so on. This shows that as a modern triathlon coach, this equipment has become commonplace in the sport and is no more a premium. I place a lot of importance on frequent communication and feedback on workouts and do not only depend on data to assess adaptations.
The technology now has progressed from just road bikes, stopwatches, and racing flats for the run, and rudimentary tri suits and wetsuits in the early 2000s to sleek and aerodynamic triathlon bikes from companies like Canyon, Specialized, and Trek to name a few. Running has advanced to carbon plate shoes from companies like Nike and Asics. Even swim training now has become more advanced with the introduction of FORM smart goggles that have an Augmented reality display of paces, HR, etc. Wearable watches from Garmin changed endurance training with real-time physiological and workout data on your wrist. Aerodynamics for the bike equipment and fabrics and Hydrodynamics for the wetsuits and swim skins are revolutionizing triathlon racing.
Nutrition in TriathIon has also advanced with the introduction of high-quality hydrogels from Maurten for better gastric emptying and the use of Continuous Glucose monitors (CGM) from Supersapiens and Ultrahuman. These devices help athletes plan and test their race nutrition for maximum glucose availability and performance. I have used this extensively for my training and nutrition to optimize my race-day nutrition (Ravichandran, 2023).
The above technologies mentioned are just a few among many that show the evolution of the sport to a technology and data-driven endeavor.
Discussion:
With the examples of the two prominent coaches from different eras given above, the common aspect in them is that none were world-class athletes in endurance sports, nor did they have any substantial athletic achievement of any kind. Yet, they are one of the best coaches in the world. This certainly proves that being a world-class athlete is not a prerequisite to being a world-class coach. The coaching methodology and philosophies of both coaches show a clear evolution and trend from a more traditional, old-school approach with more observation and coaching intuition, towards data, technology, and scientific testing driving the training plan s and program design.
Technology innovation is going to keep increasing and equipment in testing and racing is going to play a bigger factor in race finishes.
Training plans and execution of the workouts and racing make up very few hours compared to the pro or amateur's athletic career. The athlete's physical health, mental health, and well-being are of paramount importance. Making the raw data collected usable and meaningful data is key to a holistic coaching approach. Using the data-driven approach of modern performance coaching, coaches can track crucial recovery data like HRV which is proven to indicate the level of fitness and stress of an athlete (Plews, et al., 2012).
RPE can be a very important data point to use and gauge exercise effort and can be used to validate other primary data metrics (Araujo, n.d.).
Just using TSS as a value of stress applied to an athlete per week and modeling training plans just by metric is flawed in my opinion as it measures just the external training load. Environmental stress, family time, emotional stress, and other factors must be considered, and this is possible only if communication and observation are maintained in a good coach -athlete relationship. Although the relationship is technically transactional, the success of this relationship is majorly determined byintangibles like empathy, teamwork, and trust. Data collection and analysis are important but are only a part of the puzzle. The combination of the simplicity of the old -school approach with the efficient and calculated use of technology in the modern-day approach is what I believe the right approach should be.
A coach now is provided a panoramic view of the athlete's physiological and metabolic status which leaves little room for guesswork. Brett Sutton's old-school approach still stresses the importance of a holistic approach to training so does the modern approach of Olav. The difference is that for one coach it is more of a feel and intuitive understanding of the topic, to the other, the testing and data are available to validate his or her intuition. Even though Brett Sutton as a coach boasts a stellar career, his inability to adapt to the changing landscape of triathlon and endurance sport is a reason why he is currently not among the leading coaches in the world at the highest levels of the sport.
Everything that can be measured, should not necessarily be measured. The coach -athlete relationship, trust, and emotional support are of equal importance. A coach is not just a computer that processes data. The human element of coaching is the cornerstone to Long-term athletic development according to me. The data being collected must be truly useful in the program design or athlete monitoring. The simplicity of coaching is overlooked in these times. A mixed approach of coaches like Ben Sutton and Olav Aleksandr Bu would be a perfect combination.
A good coach should be athlete-centric to make sure the needs and limitations of the athlete are addressed, and the athlete feels truly cared for. Knowing when to hold your ground truly understanding what each athlete needs and designing the program accordingly with a big-picture goal in mind is essential for success. Setting realistic process goals, that when done right lead to the performance goals, keeping health and sanity as a priority, and making sure the athlete truly enjoys his/her training is of paramount importance to age group athletes as well as professionals.
Confidence in personal interactions among athletes and high-level coaches seems to be the most important factor even in the modern data-d riven coaching environment (Tendero & Martfn, 2011).
Some areas lacking in research are the role of a psychologist and visualization in triathlon. Since the sport requires you to train alone many times and race, the role of meditation could be investigated as a performance enhancer.
Specific research on how to measure overall stress among age group athletes and how they balance work, life, and sports will have to be addressed.
The role and efficacy of breathing exercises could be investigated as another way of enhancing output and endurance performance. There is room for more than technology and gadgets to be researched.
Conclusion:
The role of coaching in the triathIon arena is ever-changing and growing at a rapid rate. The coaches must ride the technology wave and adapt to the changing landscape of coaching. Physiological testing and monitoring have become a key aspect of coaching. Even age groupers/amateurs have access to advanced equipment like lactate testing and advanced equipment like carbon fiber TT bikes, tri suits, wetsuits, and aero helmets to name a few.
Metabolic testing like lactate analysis, recovery metrics like HRV, and training based on these metrics will become common among age-groupers and amateurs. Using technology correctly when feasible can be a game changer in analyzing limiters and planning individualistic training based on the needs of the athlete.
Triathlon being a very expensive sport to begin with needs to be made more easily accessible to the public and made into a mainstream sport. Local races, camps, and renting services for equipment that are not overpriced can help make the sport become mainstream.
The coaches should weigh the pros and cons of the use of new testing methods or equipment on their athletes. Even if technology will drive the modern age of triathlon, the basics and core tenets of the art of coaching and the coach-athlete relationship should not be overlooked.
A deep-rooted connection to the basics of training and coaching should be the cornerstone of a training program regardless of the type of athlete. A holistic approach towards coaching and training is key to having a healthy relationship with the sport.
The most important positive factor for coaches and athletes that determines performance is dedication/engagement (Tendero & Martin, 2011).
Coaching platforms should strive to provide an all-encompassing service to athletes by collaborating with specialists in the fields of psychology, nutrition, S&C, physical therapy, etc. can help delegate specific duties and create a team around athletes.
The athlete's well-being and the art of coaching should be the backbone around which even the technology and data-driven modern coaching should be based.
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